1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a fault-tolerant method, apparatus, and medium for a touch sensor and, more particularly, to a fault-tolerant method, apparatus, and medium for a touch sensor that can remove a signal noise and interference between operation modes in order to minimize faults and to perform judgment that approximates a user's intention in a user interface based on the touch sensor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, switches for use in home electronic appliances or liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors have been changed from an existing press switch type to a touch switch type.
A touch switch includes an electrode installed inside a front cover of an appliance. If a user touches the electrode part with his/her finger, it senses a change of capacitance induced between the electrode and the user, and transfers a sensed signal to a microprocessor or a microcomputer as a switch signal.
Such a touch switch senses a change of capacitance induced between a pre-installed electrode and a user's finger touching the electrode, a change of inductance, or a change of impedance.
A touch sensor that senses the change of capacitance reacts not only to a touch with a human's finger but also to a touch with any other human part or conductor. Thus, it is possible that a user interface (UI) system having the touch sensor causes occurrence of faults.
In addition, in the case where sensors are densely arranged, inter-signal interference may occur between adjacent detection parts of the sensors due to a hand shadow effect and so on, irrespective of the user's intention, and this causes system faults to occur.
In order to prevent such faults of a touch user interface (UI) system, many devices using the conventional touch sensors intend to perform fault tolerance by securing wide intervals among touch sensors. However, if the number of touch sensors is increased, or an operation mode is extended to a scroll up/down mode, a drag-in/out mode, a long-touch drag-in/out, and others, the possibility of fault occurrence due to the inter-signal interference becomes greater since the space for the touch sensors is limited.
In particular, in the case of a touch play pool (TPP) to which a UI design that detects an operation mode using the time difference between adjacent sensor signals in order to intuit the use of touch sensors, the above-described problem becomes greater. In order to solve this problem, a new method or system is required for an optimum design of a sensor pattern, a removal of a signal noise or inter-signal interference, and a judgment algorithm performing compensation even if a signal that does not belong to a normal operation mode is inputted.